In Popular Fiction, the Logics and Practices of a Literary Field, Ken Gelder suggests that “one of the most productive ways to think about popular fiction is in terms of genre.”1 Examples abound of creators, publishers, readers and critics of comics who appear to share this assumption and use genres as an interpretive framework to make sense of the medium. Famously, fan-produced histories of the comic book tended for a long time to measure the vitality and relevance of the industry with reference only to the superhero genre.2 Genres also function as a frequent analytical tool in contemporary comics scholarship with a variety of purposes, framing aesthetic and political inquiries, and offering boundaries to studies of industrial trends.
In most of these cases, genres are conceptualized as unproblematic encapsulations, convenient ways to refer to a vast body of work in the context of a different discussion. Genre therefore functions as a useful model of complex phenomena, which is efficient enough to suit for a variety of purposes, as long as one does not lose sight that it is, in fact, a model. Philosophers of science have long pointed out that while models are “a trade-off between factual content and explanatory power,”3 usage can obscure the nature of this compromise, leading to a disregard for methodological precautions and domains of validity. When genres become central to any argument in comics studies, a pragmatic, simplified conception is no longer operative, and a more detailed model becomes necessary.
The purpose of this book is to pave the way for such a modelization, through a study of North American comic books and graphic novels,4 although I may use examples from comic strips and from non-American publications occasionally. This corpus constitutes the aforementioned domain of validity for the arguments developed here, since I will argue that genres need to be understood within a specific cultural and industrial context. Covering manga, bande dessinée or comics produced in any other cultural sphere would therefore require significant adjustments.
Genres in Texts
Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith and Paul Levitz devote several chapters of their textbook, The Power of Comics, to the various genres of comics, with a special focus on superheroes (ch. 7) and memoirs (ch. 8). Paying attention to character types, settings, narrative patterns, themes and visual conventions, they define genres as sets of “conventions” and historically stable “shared characteristics,” which serve as a basis for a taxonomy used by critics, creators and publishers.5 This appears to be a standard approach to genre, used by scholars and fans alike, whenever the subject is not the object of the study. To use but one recent example, Brannon Costello’s thoughtful examination of the comics of Howard Chaykin consistently treats “science-fiction” as an unproblematic category of works about future events, even as Costello pays close attention to the history and functions of superheroes and of noir6; because science-fiction is not central to his project, it can be encapsulated by a standard and mostly non-historicized label.
This approach takes the comics themselves as a starting point, in a logic that is often simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive: General rules are deduced from core texts and these rules in term serve to adjudicate whether new or marginal texts effectively belong to the genre. One of the most often quoted examples of this descriptive–prescriptive approach in comics studies is Peter Coogan’s “Definition of the superhero” from his 2006 book, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. Using judicial decisions, close readings and editorial history centered on Superman and Batman, Coogan identifies three core elements to the genre—a pro-social mission, a secret identity and a distinctive costume. Although Coogan notes that canonical examples, such as the Hulk or The Fantastic Four, do not exhibit all these characteristics at once,7 he subsequently examines whether certain characters belong in the genre or not, paying attention to the trifecta of characteristics but also to the way the publishers frame these characters. Thus, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, from the eponymous TV show, is “ruled out” of the genre because of a lack of self-identification as a superhero, and Nick Fury, in Marvel Comics, is similarly excluded by his lack of costume and of a secret identity, even though his stories take place in a superhero universe. Coogan concludes in both cases that they may be “super-heroes,” but are not “superheroes”8: While they share some characteristics of core characters, such as Superman or Batman, they do not belong to the genre. In this conception, genre functions as a catalog, a series of boxes to be ticked off with central features (mission, identity, costume) and elements of context (self-identification, presence of competing genre affiliation), to which the genre’s established name provides only a crude index. In Coogan’s article, this catalog of conventions is conceived precisely as a tool allowing one to rule in or out, to resolve ambiguities and taxonomic difficulties, much like scientific classifications since Carl von Linné have sought to divide the living world into non-ambiguous categories through ever-evolving tools, from external appearance to genetic markers. Though Coogan mentions the idea that generic characteristics function as clusters of characteristics, or resemblances, he concludes on a binary distinction, ruling in or ruling out.
A refinement of the list model used by Coogan can be found in the writing of film theorist Rick Altman in his influential 1984 essay entitled “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” which offers a two-dimensional approach to genre features.9 The issue of genre has been thoroughly explored in film studies, especially within the corpus of Hollywood cinema, and provides numerous theoretical leads which I shall use throughout this book. However, as I argued before, theories and models require a domain of validity. Genre theory in film has been written based on extensive familiarity with the history and industrial structure of the medium and can only apply to comics following a thorough historical and cultural relocation, checked upon available scholarship.
In his article, Altman borrows the semantic/syntactic duality from Saussurian linguistics, to argue that genre conventions are best understood as a catalog of discrete elements (the semantic axis) along with certain organizational features (the syntactic axis). Thus, a horror narrative possesses only minimal semantic markers, maybe the presence of a monster, while a science-fiction narrative may follow a variety of narrative structures, but contains distinct settings and objects, from post-apocalyptic worlds to robots. This approach is fruitful, in that it explicitly maps genres over two dimensions and thus makes it possible to think of hybrid narratives as intersections and not as marginal cases.10 It also emphasizes the fact that genre boundaries are not based on a homogeneous set of criteria, with some genres correlated to specific affects they may generate (and even to specific bodily reactions)11 while others are defined mostly through the features of the fictional world. Narratologist Jonathan Culler calls these the parameters of “vraisemblance”12 within the diegesis, while film scholar Steve Neale refers to them as “regimes of veri...